Wex

Yiddish exhaustion….

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!I finished my new novel "The Frumkiss Family Business" (due for release in Canada at the end of September) a couple of weeks ago and am laying low until it's time to start editing..... You call this a vacation? I’m so tired that I don’t even know how to describe myself. Am I oysgemutshet un oysgematert, “run down and...

Wex

Spit three times when you win an award

The audio version of my book, Just Say Nu, recently won an award and I found myself confronted with the same problem that I had to face after Born to Kvetch won something: How could I let people know? How was I to say something nice about myself without calling down an evil eye and very likely destroying the very good fortune that I wanted to talk about? How are you supposed to spit three times at the end...

Wex

The evil inclination

The yeytser horeh, the evil inclination, is still alive and well among our children. My thirteen year-old daughter just informed me that a friend of hers has been grounded after coming home from what was supposed to have been a Yom Ha’Atzma’ut party with “a hickey the size of a matzoh ball.” It’s probably a good thing. According to the medresh, "Were it not for the yeytser horeh, no one would...

Wex

Yiddish and the Dave Clark Five

Early last week I found myself using the Yiddish phrase kosher fardint without any hint of irony. This doesn’t happen often. Although there’s no necessary reason not to use kosher fardinen (the infinitive form) to mean exactly what it appears to mean, “to earn in a kosher way, to obtain something by means of honest toil and effort,” it seems to be used more often in the sense of “it serves him...

Wex

The worst thing you can say in Yiddish

Someone recently asked me about the worst thing that you can say in Yiddish. After weeding out all the obvious contenders, I realized that the final frontier of Yiddish cursing also involves the ultimate reversal of any victim’s expectations: Zolst onkumen tsu mayn mazl, "you should have my luck.” In other words, “The worst thing I can wish on you is...that you should be me.” Ale tsuris vos ikh hob...